Looking over the offerings at CES 2011, the ASUS Eee Slate EP121 caught my eye as I had been looking for a replacement slate computer since my beloved Motion M1400 found a new home with my niece. I ordered one as soon as it was available and I got it arrived this week. Tablet computers have always interested me because I love to write my ideas down. Paper and pen work great but as you can tell from my blogging I love writing things down in OneNote; officially the greatest software ever made. Being able to keep that rolling development journal of all those random thoughts that’s completely searchable is wonderful. While I’m also a huge proponent of Apple hardware for my computing and phone needs, I’ve never considered an iPad because it doesn’t come with a pen and there’s no app that will integrate my handwriting from the iPad into OneNote.
All you younger folks that grew up in the keyboard era are rolling your eyes and thinking I must be some old codger with my ancient ways. While I am certainly a “mature” individual, I’d encourage you to try jotting down your thoughts on a paper (or slate!) the next time you’re debugging a problem or designing some code. It’s that act of writing the sentence by hand that slows you down and gets you thinking deeply about the problem. It’s what works for me, so I’ll let my cognitive dissonance kick in and assume it works for everyone.
For my primary purpose of writing in OneNote, the ASUS works wonderfully great. It has a full WACOM tablet with dual touch built in so you can poke things in the task bar and do general computer using with your finger. My backup laptop is a Lenovo X200 Tablet, and I’m pleasantly surprised at how much better the touch experience is on the ASUS against technology that’s 2.5 years old. Even though I will be pointing out some flaws in the ASUS computer later in this article, the device has proudly earned its spot nestled to the right of my mouse to be used at a moment’s notice. I’m totally committed to keeping it because I threw out the shipping box today.
While the screen on the ASUS is amazingly sharp, I didn’t think that would make much of an impact on my day to day usage. However, with its 178° viewing angle I can glance over at it and read anything no matter what position I’m sitting or standing at my desk. With my previous slates and Tablet PCs, I’d have to almost look on top of them to see what my notes said. Anything that lessens breaking the train of thought is cool with me.
As I mentioned, I’ve found the touch works decently, being able to scroll with a finger or poke in your password when waking from sleep is very convenient. The hardware serves up the touch well, but Windows 7 has a few limitations I’d like to see fixed in Windows 8. The first is that on slates with touch, Windows should default to opening all windows maximized if at all possible. Trying to resize a window by touching and dragging the window border is kind of impossible because your finger is far wider than the border. I’d love an option to have Windows automatically make things like window borders and splitter items (like the one pixel wide control in Explorer that divide the folders from the details) bigger. You can use a lot of Windows with touch and the on screen keyboard, but you won’t write the next Moby *** that way. With some relatively small tweaks Windows could be a pretty usable by just touch.
I do have to take ASUS to task on a couple of hardware issues. The first is that there’s a fan in the slate that seems to run a bunch and it’s a lot noisier than you would expect. In my office I have two Mac Pro desktop machines and if the fan output area is pointing at me, I hear the ASUS over the Mac Pros. Granted the ASUS is closer to me where the Mac Pros are underneath my desk, but I’m not thrilled with the noise. I normally keep the ASUS in portrait mode so I just rotated the screen around until the fan was farthest away from me and that lessens the noise but doesn’t eliminate it.
Some parts of the ASUS unit are unfortunately cheaply made, or at least appear to be cheaply made. The worst culprits are the USB port covers. When I paved the machine to put Windows Ultimate on it so I could join it to my domain, I needed to plug in a USB keyboard and mouse. To get those covers open, I eventually was down to carefully prying them open with a screwdriver because they are impossible to get off any other way. Annoyingly if you spend the five minutes to reseat the covers, you have to bring out the screwdriver to pry them off again. The covers mean the USB plugs are deeply set and so it’s hard to get your devices plugged in correctly. On future revisions ASUS should skip the covers and make the USB ports flush.
There’s one combination of hardware and software on the ASUS that’s eye rolling unforgivable. The ASUS has an accelerometer in it to determine up and down so the screen can automatically rotate. That’s great, but when you do rotate the screen goes black for FIVE OR SIX seconds before the screen returns. That time is not an exaggeration, I’ve tested it many times. My guess is that this is an issue with either the Intel graphics hardware or the Intel graphics software. Using the latest video drivers from the ASUS site made no difference. Did no one at ASUS notice this before shipping? In the word of iPads and Honeycombs, this doesn’t make ASUS (or more likely Intel) look good. Oddly, I found the screen rotation is faster in the Windows 7 Screen Resolution Control Panel. It takes three seconds, which is still horrible.
Up until now I’ve had a ton of work to do so have not spent any time looking at battery life. The unit is only advertised with three hours, which in reality is, if you’re lucky, only two. For many people that adds up to a whole lot of tablet fail. I’m not thrilled with the battery life, but 95% of my usage will be at my desk with a power cord right there so it’s not a big issue for me. If you’re thinking of using this tablet in a school setting or in lots of conference room meetings, you won’t get far. The specifications for the machine make it quite fast, but ASUS would sell many more if they went more tablet than laptop in this tablet.
While not perfect, the ASUS Eee Slate EP121 does a fantastic job at what I need it to do. If you have the same sort of requirements, there’s no way you’ll be disappointed. But, if I step back and consider the tablet market as a whole, ASUS is missing the mark a bit so I’d say that overall the score is two out of five.
All opinions are mine and mine alone, they do not reflect Wintellects or any employee of Wintellect.
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Thanks for the great review. I have been on te fence on this one, since I've used Tablet PCs since the early days of last decade. A good slate with pen input to jot down notes is hard to come by these days, and I think this one gets close. What kills it for me is battery life, as I would use it on the go for the most part. You confirm what's keeping me on the fence.
So, the search for a slate where I can ink and that has good battery life continues...
Have you actually measured battery life in the setting you are describing. I find it hard to believe taking notes is going to run through a full charge in 2 hours. That would mean you'd be lucky to get 1.5 hours of video playback. Seems a bit pessimistic. My M1400 gets almost 3 hours when wifi is off and brightness is 60%
Can you elaborate on what your power settings were, what level of brightness you had the unit set at and what things (e.g., bluetooth, wireless, etc.) when you got the 2 hours.
I’ve had the EP121 and I do agree with you about the USB covers, they can be a pain to pry off but least the USB ports exist. As for screen rotation you’re over playing the importance of screen rotation in Windows. The vast majority of the time users are going to be in landscape on this device and probably are going to be bouncing much between orientations. Yes it’s slow but really 1280x800 is a far more useable resolution in Windows than 800x1280 and most programs are going to work better, save eReaders. Also unless you’ve actually done battery tests, please don’t guess. If you had bother to read comments of other users that have actually tested the battery life, 3.5 hours is what they are getting in Balanced mode, with more aggressive power saving features I’ve been able to get up to 4. And if you can hear your fan you might have a defective unit. I’ve been keeping my EP121 on my beside table at night for the last week and I can hear the noise of my cable DVR which is a good 12 ft. from my ears over the fan in the EP121 less than two feet away. I believe that you rating of 2 out of 5 is completely arbitrary and may be impacted by the possibility that you have a defective unit. There are 5 user reviews on the device on Amazon and the device thus far has a 4.5 out of 5 rating and I concur with this.
Thanks for a great review. Like the previous poster, I too was very concerned about battery life. Your results help me decide against getting this tablet. Hope Asus and other would-be tablet players learn a lesson that battery life is one of the most important factors to consider for a tablet, and processing power ain't.
Thanks for the review. One thing that you might not be aware of: if you double click the title bar of any window, it maximizes/restores the window. That way you don't have to fiddle with the edges to drag the edges.
Hello All,
Thanks for all the great comments! I'm especially glad for Heatlesssun's comments for a different perspective. By way of rebuttal, I do feel the rotation issue is a big deal. If you don't lock the rotation, normal movement and usage causes screen flips. I've locked mine in landscape and gave up on automatic rotation. Anyway. the rotation should take no more than 1 second.
I've done some real world testing on the battery life. I spent an hour with the unit in my lap off the battery writing a big brain dump. I was only running OneNote with the brightness set to absolute minimum in the power settings and wifi on to ensure the notebook synced. In one hour, that used 40% of the battery. Much of that is because OneNote is chewing the CPU doing ink to text conversion. Those who called me out for not doing the testing were right, so I apologize for that.
My feeling is still that the EP 121 has to have far better battery life. Users shouldn't have to do aggressive power management to do common tasks, like taking notes in OneNote. I hope for the next version of this tablet, ASUS gets it to four hours of real world usage battery life. That's where devices like the EP 121 need to be to be useful.
Keep the comments coming!
- John Robbins
"Hope Asus and other would-be tablet players learn a lesson that battery life is one of the most important factors to consider for a tablet, and processing power ain't."
Really?
"While not perfect, the ASUS Eee Slate EP121 does a fantastic job at what I need it to do. If you have the same sort of requirements, there’s no way you’ll be disappointed."
Sounds like John needs the power. You're falling into the zero sum game trap. Not everyone is looking for a slate appliance, some want and need a slate COMPUTER.
Also John's battery life numbers are just wrong guesses. 4 hours is achievable and with a 1 lbs. external battery 8 hours of outlet free operation should be possible. I'm in the process of trying to get an Energizer XP 18000 external battery tip for the EP121 which should give it enough on the go life for the vast majority of people looking for extended outlet free operation.
3.5 lbs. of device weight for an i5 based machine is very decent. And it does Flash.
Not trying to beat up on you John. Sure screen rotation is slow, that’s Windows, it’s not designed at this point to rotate the screen on the fly. But again I have to point out that the vast majority of Windows applications are designed for landscape mode. So it is a weakness that tends to have little real world implications for most people. And of course it would be great if the EP121’s battery life were better. But this is a 2.6 lbs. Core i5 based machine. It’s simply not designed for long battery life. The EP121 was designed to give a GREAT Windows Tablet PC experience at the expense of battery life and with it a bit of bulk. I also have an HP Slate 500 which gets a good bit more battery life and is the same weight as an iPad but it sacrifices performance to do these things.
While OneNote might be a common task for Tablet PC users, there’s no true analog to it on other platforms especially when you consider inking. This I how I like at battery life; more is great but if the device sacrifices functionality and performance that I want and need to do it then what has it really gotten me? I could take an iPad around with a cumbersome capacitive stylus and no palm rejection and slow and application based handwriting recognition and get better battery life but at the expense of good functionality for the task. If the task is of value to me I can spend a little time adjusting power settings or invest in an external battery. If the task isn’t of value then I can opt for a device with better battery life and just live with inferior capability. I feel that too many people look at battery life without ANY regard to what a device is actually needed for while it’s running on the battery. A million hours of battery life does no good if the device doesn’t actually accomplish the task.
Obviously the EP121 isn’t for everyone. If all one wants or needs from a slate device is to watch movies or surf the web, yes there are better devices. That said I’ve been watching movies on the EP121 and the screen is WONDERFUL for this task. The ride is short on battery but thrilling.
But if ore does things like note taking, which is a primary function for me on my Tablet PCs, or artistic work, short battery life or not, the EP121 is a FANTASTIC device for these tasks and I think that most people will be able to find solutions to their power concerns if they at the very least simply ask other users. There are a couple of great sites around full of Tablet PC enthusiasts that have a LOT of experience and knowledge and can help inexperienced users do things like squeeze out more battery life and such.
Along these lines you may want to install the latest Intel HD Graphics drivers: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=19761&ProdId=3231&lang=engI’ve not tested them thoroughly but it looks like these drivers are a good bit more aggressive at power management and should yield another 30 minutes or so of battery life. As I said this is just my initial guess from looking at the power consumption rate and core CPU speeds which seem to throttle lower than with the previous drivers.
Heatlesssun,
You are not beating up on me at all. :) I greatly appreciate your comments because you are bringing a different perspective and very valid constructive criticism to what I wrote. Thanks also for the link to the updated video drivers, I'll try them out when I get back home after my business trip and see if they do better for me.
You bring up a great point about using the EP 121 as a computer. The specs on the machine are sufficient that I could easily consider it a backup development computer. For your needs and what you've mentioned on how you use it, I can see why you rate it higher and if those were my needs, I would as well.
My criticism, especially on the battery life, was thinking about the market as a whole. For you and I, the EP121 rocks, but when I considered taking the unit into your standard back-to-back 1+ hour classes or business meetings, it falls short as a tablet for the general population. Battery life isn't the only consideration, but it's very high on the target audiences list.
It's obvious we both like the EP 121. I'm definitely keeping mine because it does exactly what I need and it sounds like you are as well. I very much appreciate your input and passion. The fun of a blog is hearing from someone who disagrees and presents a strong case. Thanks again!
- John Robbins